Laurel Walker | In My Opinion

Daughter's passion puts mom with MS in race

Chris Wilson

Runner Ashley Kumlien (left) and her mother, Jill Kumlien, work out Thursday in Delafield.

Jill Kumlien has been living with multiple sclerosis for a long time - more than 30 years.

You might say it's been her marathon.

Now meet her daughter Ashley, an ultramarathoner who's put new purpose to her passion of long-distance running.

By running, she's been raising money for research into MS for the past couple of years. One she's really looking forward to is the Brewers Mini-Marathon in September, where she'll push her mother in an adult stroller for 13.1 miles - Jill's first official race.

"We keep each other going," says Jill, with a loving smile toward her daughter.

Ashley, 28, of Hartland, is a fitness trainer. She works for Be Fitness and Wellness Center in Delafield and has her own weight loss boot camp called Fitness Journey.

So yes, it's her career. But it's also her life.

Ashley works with her mom a couple of days each week at the gym, concentrating on balance, strength and aerobics. Jill is a willing client.

The summer heat and Jill's worsening symptoms more recently haven't always made the workout routine possible. But as Jill demonstrated for me this week at Be Fitness, and as Ashley described it, "she'll try anything. She doesn't know her boundaries."

Jill was a little unstable on the stability ball, her brain not quite translating the messages to keep her feet on the floor and her body balanced. But she went like gangbusters on the arm bike and the recumbent cross trainer, smiling along the way.

As Jill puts it, working out on equipment with her daughter is more interesting than sitting on a couch at home or even watching TV from her recumbent bike.

The Elm Grove native was a young woman, married to Keith Kumlien just 3½ years and the mother of their first child born 18 months earlier, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

MS is a disease that attacks the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. Its symptoms can vary significantly from patient to patient and range from mild, such as numbness, to severe, such as paralysis and blindness. For this woman, who was an active slalom water skier in her youth and whose family raised horses that she loved to ride, it meant a slow decline in her abilities.

"It's by the grace of God that I'm doing as well as I am," Jill said. Keith, her primary caregiver, said that she did quite well, showing no serious symptoms for about eight years, until seizures "kind of beat her up a little."

Chasing their four kids around kept them both busy. When Ashley and her younger sister went off to different colleges and played soccer, the Town of Brookfield couple would travel to watch their games.

Ashley spent a couple of years after college traveling the world as a fitness instructor on a cruise ship, running on the boats and in the foreign lands.

She'd always loved distance running, and after seeing so many foreign countries, she thought about running to see America.

"I was running one morning and I said, 'I should do it for my mom!' "

And so began her plans to set up a nonprofit organization - MS Run The US - by which she could raise money for MS research while running across America.

"I quit my job and told Mom and Dad," she said. "I just thought it was my calling."

If they thought she was crazy, they didn't tell her.

"I just thought it was exciting," said Jill. "You can't hold Ashley back."

In January 2010, Ashley ran her first marathon, an indoor event. Later that year, she did what she set out to do, running 3,230 miles across the U.S., most of it by running a half marathon in the mornings, half in the afternoons.

She'd hoped to raise $500,000 but achieved $56,000 for the National MS Society. While she said the total was disappointing, "that's not what our effort was about. What I learned is it's really about involvement and community interaction. It's a good way to raise money, but not enough people were involved."

Now she's working on MS Run the US 2013 Relay, enlisting 22 runners from across the country to cover 140-mile segments of the country, each over six days and raising money for MS research in the process.

Ashley said she became interested in ultramarathons through a book while prepping for her 2010 run across the U.S. That's when she realized people ran longer distances than 26.2 miles.

Now, she does, too. She prefers 50-milers, but she ran her first 100-miler in June.

"That was a lot of fun," she said. "I like the experience and I like the challenge." She also has bonded with the small network of fellow ultramarathoners.

What does it take to run one?

"Time," she laughed. "Lots of time. And the desire to do it, because if you don't want to do it you won't be committed to training."

Because of her MS Run the US organization and her endurance racing experience, she was asked to join a July 29 event in San Francisco where she and five other athletes will run back-to-back marathons to promote Worth the Hurt, a new platform for charitable fundraising. Her share of the proceeds will benefit the MS Society, she said.

Though the Brewers Mini-Marathon on Sept. 22 is a lot shorter, it will likely top Ashley's list of memories.

She learned about it through a friend who referred her to " myTEAM TRIUMPH."

It's a program aimed at giving people with disabilities the chance to ride along on events like marathons that they normally wouldn't be able to experience. In the Kumliens' case, Jill would be the team captain and Ashley would be the "angel" pushing her along the way.

Ashley said she hopes to raise $13,100 through the event - a figure symbolic because the race is 13.1 miles.

The thought of pushing her mom through a race - something that had never occurred to her before - brought her to tears as she described it.